I have a scenario where I have an XML advanced PDF template, and SuiteScript renders the PDF.
However, one of the fields on the record I'm working with, is a text area, and the user has entered -- (to hyphens) in the text.
The PDF when rendering doesn't like this, as -- renders as escape characters when the fields are embedded with BFO.
what I want to do, is dynamically replace this field
${item.customtextfield?replace("--","..","r") or something like that, and see if that gets around the issue.
A bit like replacing & with & in URLs for images.
My regex knowledge is not very good within freemarker, so not sure if above is correct.
I haven't seen the rest of your code, but if your field is a custom body field, you probably need to access record instead of item.
This worked for me (in my case, custbody_textarea is a custom field on invoice record):
<#if record.custbody_textarea?has_content>
${record.custbody_textarea?replace("--", "..")}
</#if>